From a distance, 23-year-old Risa Oshinsky’s BFA thesis project at SUNY New Paltz looks like an intricate Calder mobile, but more primal. Before photography, before film, before AI, before the printing press, there were cave drawings and oral storytelling, painting and sculpture. Oshinsky’s three-dimensional ethereal Afterlife, resembles ancient artifacts. Hung from wires, it swings gently when the doors to the Dorsky Gallery open. And then its articulated parts settle and catch the light. What is this, I wondered, as I walked around it, mesmerized, and snapped a couple of photos with my iPhone. Up close, I deciphered bones. Were they human? I hoped not.
“I suffered from panic disorders when I was young. Somehow the horror genre in movies and books helped me cope. I worked in a haunted house when I was in high school,” she told me during a phone conversation during the winter break.
Staged by professionals, haunted houses and forests are an industry these days — there are more than ten in Ulster County — which says something about the fear level in our culture. School shootings, lockdown drills, pandemics, bullying — and that is a shortlist — are all amplified by instantaneous news scrolls on social media. Catastrophe, and the threat of catastrophe, hits young people hard.
When she discussed her anxieties and fascination with morbidity to her sculpture professor, Michael Asbill, he gave her the idea to attempt a work using bones.
“I had an intimate connection with the bones as I was cleaning and polishing them,” she says matter-of-factly. “The animal had been violently killed, and then thrown onto a dump site. It was comforting and calming to clean the bones.”
Risa is in good company: Henry Moore, Damien Hirst and Orozco, all used bones in their work, as does Professor Asbill himself. “I meet all my students where they are,” he says, “but I suppose you could say that Risa and I found each other.”
He had discovered a dump site on Route 213 near New Paltz in 2001at the top of a steep slope where carcasses are thrown by the police or road workers. Road kill is a manifestation of humans encroaching on natural habitat; ours is not a thoughtful, shared environment, and the dump is not a sacred burial site. Though it’s legal to harvest meat and bones in New York State, not many can stomach the stench at the site or the vista of dead bodies.
It takes about two weeks for a carcass to decompose before the bones slide down towards the river. Risa collected a stash, soaked them in dish soap, scrubbed them with a toothbrush, bleached them with hydrogen peroxide, dried them, and sorted them into boxes, a painstaking process.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, she is a vegetarian. “I love animals. I’ll stop to help a wounded animal on the side of the road,” she told me. “Working with animal bones is calming, intimate and meditative.” The shape of the work, its meaning, surfaces as she cleans, handles and sorts. It’s a brave undertaking for one still so young.
“Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment,” Marshall McLuhan once said. Risa Oshinksy has seen beyond the boundary of her own still young life into a future of art making. For the viewer, there’s an admonition embedded in her work: to take care of the environment and each other.
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